Heritage Structures Anchor Our Community

Retaining key heritage buildings shows us where we have come from, and gives a sense of where we might go.
Ideally, we will choose to preserve buildings that represent our culture. All too often, those are the structures we lose first.

Once Lost, Gone Forever

The Doc Sloan House, known for years as Miquels

The Trysting Steps in photo about 1900

The Bluff Walk in an old postcard

Green Gables

William T. Wells House

Not lost yet, but fading fast.

Our Last Remaining 19th Century Mansion. Green Gables was the showplace of Melbourne in the early days.

Click on the image for more information

Tools for Historic Preservation

Online Cemetery Survey Tool

A tool to speed collection of basic data for a Cemetery Survey

This tool grew out of some questions on the NTHP Forum as to whether there were
any computer based tools to speed the collection of data for survey projects. The notion of a computer tool was strengthened by a friend's experience putting
together data for a small cemetery survey. There is a lot of routine data to gather and organize, a task for which computers are better suited than people with pen and paper. Now that computers and PDA's are less expensive there's no question that the time has come for an inexpensive and accessible tool suitable
for smaller projects. With 30 years experience in software engineering and a fairly new degree
in Historic Preservation, I decided to put one together.

Help me to develop this further. The tool is complete, functional, and available for use by those who want to help with testing and refinement.

Historic Preservation helps us maintain a relationship with our heritage, with
those who have gone before us. My goal is to understand why a building was built
in a certain way, how it way used. I am especially interested in the mechanical
devices that were so important to the use of a structure. How was the building heated
or cooled, how were messages, freight, and people moved between floors. These are
the details of a structure that are so easily lost.